One of the best film-related books I’ve read since the pandemic is Hollywood: The Oral History. Editors Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson assembled thousands of excerpts from American Film Institute (AFI) interviews with filmmakers, actors and other industry figures into a panorama of Hollywood filmmaking from the silents to the present.
In my own, smaller way, I’d like to do something similar in a new feature for Earthly Delights: a chronicle of contemporary indie filmmaking, featuring discussions with filmmakers on various topics. I’ve already published the first edition as part of my Robert Altman retrospective and plan on making this a monthly series.1 (If you have any suggestions for filmmakers to spotlight or topics to cover, please let me know in the comments.)
For this post, I invited four filmmakers to reflect on the very beginning of their creative processes. As a writer myself, I know that very few things in life are quite as energizing as finding that initial idea that opens up a whole new creative pathway and I’m fascinated with how that plays out for other people. I can’t think of a better way to begin this new series.
Michael Kellman has, from his earliest moments, been passionate about film, television, theater, performance, and comedy. He spends his time working on his craft as a writer and director as well as a performer. Say Less represents Michael’s feature film debut. He is currently finishing his second feature, Burn Pretty, a micro-budget inspired by the French New Wave.
Matthew Levine is a writer/director from Los Angeles and recent graduate from NYU Tisch, where he was selected for a directing workshop with Jon Watts and a Semi-Finalist in the Coca-Cola Refreshing Films contest. His thesis film, The Roswell Report, is hitting the festival circuit this year.
H. Nelson Tracey is a filmmaker based in Los Angeles. His directorial debut Breakup Season, starring Chandler Riggs (The Walking Dead) and Samantha Isler (Captain Fantastic), premiered at 39 film festivals nationwide ahead of an 18-city theatrical run and video-on-demand release in December 2024. He has also produced and edited numerous documentaries: his non-fiction work can be seen on Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+. He is currently developing his next feature film.
Kevin Walls is a BAFTA Scotland New Talent Award-winning filmmaker and actor based in Glasgow. His debut feature film, Premature, is slated for a UK theatrical release in September 2026.
What was the initial moment of inspiration for your film?
The inspiration that ultimately led to Say Less sprang entirely from budgetary constraints. My mission was to make my first feature. I spent a year writing four different features, one after another, with the expectation for each that it would be the film I made. The first version, which I spent the most time on of the unmade features, I went into thinking - I won't worry too much about budget, I'll just write the movie that I want to make. No explosions or car chases or anything of course, but if the characters went to eat at a restaurant, they went to eat at a restaurant. It ended up being perhaps a one million dollar movie.
Michael Kellman
While I was attending the NYU Screenwriting in London study abroad program, I had begun watching The X-Files, which constantly mentions the "Roswell Incident" as a key event in UFO mythology. I had heard of the Roswell Incident in my favorite pieces of science fiction for years, from Futurama to Indiana Jones. When I read that the alleged weather balloon that crashed was named "NYU Flight 4", I knew I had to dig deeper. My school was responsible for the Roswell Incident? What's the story there? The more I read, the more the story presented itself, and I knew it would be the perfect premise to fit my sensibilities for my senior thesis film.
Matthew Levine
In December of 2011, my sister and I were home for the holidays, she came over laughing saying “my friend is so mad at her brother right now. He brought his girlfriend home for Christmas, they broke up, and now she’s stuck with them for 5 more days.” Instantly I knew: that’s a great movie right there. But for a long time (over a decade) I could never get anywhere on the script because I was thinking about it like a typical Christmas movie, but my own breakups (which I went and experienced) were not points of comedy. Around 2022, when I was getting serious about making my debut feature, I reframed the film in my mind as a drama first, comedy second, and the pages started finally coming into some semblance of a strong script. The rest is history.
H. Nelson Tracey
I’d been struggling to write something I could realistically produce on a micro-budget, so I’d parked the idea of making a feature and focused on teaching, acting, and crew work. In summer 2024, I was working as a cinematographer on a PSA about drug driving. I bought a rig to mount the camera to a car for driving shots and was really pleased with how it turned out. That pushed me towards the idea of a road movie, loosely inspired by The Puffy Chair. The initial concept followed a disillusioned couple on a road trip to pick up a used crib from the Scottish Highlands.
Kevin Walls
How did you know that that idea was a feature film?
What immediately stood out to me within my research was the professor-student dynamic between the Director of Research, Dr. Athelstan Spilhaus, and the project engineer, Charles Moore. They had worked together in World War II, when Charles saved their important balloons from freezing by attaching a blow torch and a mop bucket. However, when Spilhaus recruited him to work for him at NYU, he was never told the true purpose of the craft, the payload it was carrying, or even the classified name of the project. As soon as I saw this relationship, how their father-son dynamic and mentorship are tested by the project’s secrecy, I knew I had clear characters and a core conflict that was worthy of a film.
Matthew Levine
Debut features generally need to be contained ideas for budget reasons, and this one screams first feature because its entire cast could be the family without feeling like a small movie. It was never going to be a short film, but it felt like the right script for my debut feature, and a topic/storyline I could do justice to.
H. Nelson Tracey
I think it could have been a feature, but I quickly realised how difficult a road movie would be to pull off with very little money. I also wasn’t fully satisfied with the characters. So I shifted the dynamic. I made them flatmates instead of a couple, and introduced the pregnancy as the inciting incident. An unexpected pregnancy isn’t a particularly original idea, but that didn’t really concern me. I’d never told that story before, so I felt I could bring my own perspective to it.
Kevin Walls
How did you develop that initial idea into a script?
The movie that ultimately became Say Less went through probably 60 script iterations, and for me it's just a matter of writing each day and once there's a finished draft, looking back on it and seeing what works and what doesn't. If you allow yourself to be steered by your reactions to it, your instincts will tell you what the script wants to be - as filtered by your unconscious taste. It was originally a family drama in which the parents played a much, much larger role. I had actors do a table read of that script with a small audience of people I trusted. It was clear to me during that reading that this was the kids' story. We cared about them and wanted to follow them, and when things became more focused on the parents, it didn't work as well. So I pivoted. I did one more table read before finishing the script. For the record, I haven't done that since and it's not how I usually work, although a table read is always valuable.
Michael Kellman
Getting from the outline to a presentable draft was the greatest challenge in such a technical project. My early rough drafts contained way too much science, detailing the elements of their flight from materials to atmospheric physics. It was boring. The best note I got in my thesis class was, “Why am I watching your film, instead of a documentary about this?” It also had to be interesting for those with no familiarity with the subject. The final drafts were the improvement the story needed. Instead of just a high-level History Channel, we grounded the story back to the characters and their relationship.
Matthew Levine
It remained a simple outline of nothing for ages, I went and lived my life and worked on other things, then in early 2022 I sort of made a pact with myself that the next big step would be jumping to make a feature, and this one had the right materials to do so.
H. Nelson Tracey
I briefly considered seeking private investment, but as a first-time feature director, I didn’t think anyone in their right mind would fund it. So I outlined the film in a notebook and just started writing. The first draft came together quickly, but by the time we shot, we were on draft 17 or 18. They weren’t page-one rewrites. The structure was there early on. Most of the work was refining characters, tightening dialogue, and adapting scenes to make the film achievable on a micro-budget.
Kevin Walls
How did you pitch your idea?
I didn't do much pitching. I'm unfortunately pretty averse to it and not particularly good at it, and although I put lots of feelers out for potential investors, didn't get anything close to interest back. So all the "pitching" I did was for the IndieGoGo campaign I ran, which raised 25K, a quarter of the budget. I worked hard to make sure I created the best possible IGG campaign. I studied the most successful campaigns of all time and emulated them, and I shot both a teaser for the movie and an interview with the cast, in which I gave a little pitch for donating to the movie. 50K of the budget was my life savings, and the other 25K came from an extremely generous childhood friend.
Michael Kellman
To pitch the idea, I embraced genre conventions and how I can make the film feel familiar yet new. I compared it to investigative thrillers like The Insider and historical dramas like Oppenheimer or Chernobyl. The toughest part of pitching was clarifying that this is not a sci-fi film. Although it embraces sci-fi aesthetics and subject matter, it’s grounded, a dramatized version of a true story. UFO discussions had a big year in 2025, so while I took advantage of that, I also had to distinguish it. A way that we did that was by intercutting the launch scene from our film with real released footage from the 1947 experiments to create an authenticity. One of the most important parts of the pitch is that this is the story people have heard, but the angle that has not been explored. Although the general public has vaguely heard of the Roswell Incident, Project Mogul was only declassified in the 90s and no one has researched these characters like myself.
Matthew Levine
Early on I identified key allies and partners: Oregon Film and The Eastern Oregon Film Festival were the two most vital. It takes a village and people overlook that at first, the more orgs like this you can have, the better luck you'll have. I secured my seed funding and then proceeded to spend a year doing all the things filmmakers need to do to fundraise: meetings and outreach, majority of which were dead ends, but enough to get us on track to make the film in 2023. The script and deck were adjusted concurrently. We had a built in deadline: because it's a Christmas movie, we had to shoot the film by Feb 2023, or punt it a year. I knew if we did punt, we'd lose momentum, thankfully we didn't. Filmmaking is all about momentum, people want to join moving projects, but you have to keep that energy alive.
H. Nelson Tracey
How did your script evolve into the final film?
Say Less would be of much lower quality if I hadn't had the rehearsal time that I did with my actors. Rehearsal is extremely important to me. Rehearsal reveals a scene. It can reveal the scene doesn't work at all, or, conversely, that it's perfect. Often it's somewhere in between. It allows me to find the best and most natural blocking and develop a working relationship and shared language with each individual actor. Every actor is different, and as a director you should speak to each one differently depending on what they respond to. We rehearsed for 3 weeks leading up to the Say Less shoot, 4-5 days/week for 3-5 hours. That process changed the script as well. Often a scene would work well as written. But sometimes hearing some of my writing out loud made me wince - which means it's time to change a line. Good actors will have ideas for you, great actors will sometimes have ideas that are better than yours. I had great actors. So the script, and what Say Less would ultimately be, evolved through rehearsal. Not very much changed once the camera was rolling.
And then Say Less changed completely again in the edit. As they say a movie is made three times: when it's written, when it's shot, and when it's edited. I put this movie together in every configuration it could possible be arranged in the edit. The movie you watched is the best version I felt I could draw from the footage at that time, tempered by a tremendous amount of trial and error. It never ceases to amaze me how much a movie changes in the editing room. The edit, even more so than the script, will tell you what it wants to be. It'll show you clearly what is and isn't working, and you have to try to listen.
Michael Kellman
Through production, the script had not changed too much because we had such a high bar to focus on regarding the production design and making the period piece feel lived in. However, in post-production, the script evolved a lot as we were able to see the final product in a new light. The original opening was cut, and an alternate take from the 2nd act balloon launch was repurposed to create two separate balloon launches, and a stronger opening where we see Charles at what he is good at. We also had to remember the lessons learned from the rough draft, and several lines with scientific jargon were cut in exchange for showing more of the actors’ expressions. Less is more and show don’t tell feel like obvious statements, but make all the difference. I see a film as a blank cube of marble that takes time and effort to chip away until you see the sculpture from your mind’s eye. What matters most when you have a strong vision is to never keep searching for it.
Matthew Levine
The pitch and script remained malleable but solidified by December, when we started casting. One of the key things that helped is along the way, I did 3 live readings of the screenplay with actor friends, and each informed script improvements to get us to a shooting script. That’s now a vital step in my process. It’s a long road, but it can be done.
H. Nelson Tracey
We went into production in June 2025 and shot over 23 days. I handled the offline edit myself while cutting a trailer to launch a crowdfunding campaign for post-production. In October 2025, we raised over £10,000. The trailer reached more than 130,000 organic views, which completely blew me away. Now, at the end of March 2026, we’re about to screen the film for the cast and crew for the first time.
Kevin Walls
Thanks so much to Dan Mirvish, Jared Sprouse and josh for their contributions.